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May 28, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:00:43
Episode 545 Scott Adams: 2020 Election Prediction Update, Can Biden Really Beat Trump?
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Joe and Mashin and Andrew, I see you.
Grab a seat in the front.
We're waiting for everybody else to sit down before we get into our fascinating, fascinating Periscope of the Day.
More fascinating than ever before.
Or not. We'll see.
We'll see how this develops. A reminder, if you don't catch this live, it is available to see on Periscope in a replay, but also on YouTube.
So if you prefer the YouTube experience, just do a search for the phrase, Real Coffee with Scott Adams, and it'll pop up on YouTube.
Where it's also monetized, so it's got that advantage.
All right, so enough about that.
So, yesterday I had a surreal experience of Devin Nunes retweeting my Periscope slash YouTube from yesterday.
The one he retweeted was the one which I described how to identify fake news, which was kind of cool.
Because if you think about it, Devin Nunes is probably most famous For being the person who dug into this whole Russia collusion fake news stuff.
So he's sort of the, probably the most famous fake news exposure in the world.
And he retweeted my video on that topic.
So that was kind of cool. In other famous people news, I checked my Wikipedia page to see if there were any surprises there.
And there are. Well, I've got to go over to myself and tell you.
I think he's probably been removed by now.
But at one point he said that I was good friends with Bob Dole.
I've never met Bob Dole, but if you went to my Wikipedia page, it would say, you know, I think it said, citation needed, meaning that there was no source for it, of course.
But there was a sentence on my Wikipedia page saying that Bob Dole and I were good friends.
Never met him. But there's also an award on here.
It says, Adams is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
So that's the first sentence under my personal life on Wikipedia, is that I'm a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
I don't even know what that is.
I've never heard of it.
Is there something called the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences?
Apparently I'm a member.
Never heard of it. It says I'm a former member of Mensa.
That part is true. Then there's some stuff about my health problems.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
And, alright.
So, I'm not going to read the rest of that, but I think the rest of it's closer to true.
Alright, some other things that are fun.
You know about the GoFundMe campaign for building the wall.
So, as a private GoFundMe, People donated, they raised $20 million, and they're actually building some wall.
So the private people found a piece of wall, or a piece of no wall where they wanted to build, that apparently connects to pieces of existing fence slash wall.
So they figured if they just do this part, the several, however many miles it is, that they'll have a longer contiguous wall and it should make a big difference.
Now I don't know if that's going to work or not.
We'll see. Alright, you came in for the coffee.
Or the coffee, as some of you say.
I know it's time. Raise your glass, your mug, your cup.
Could be a chalice or a stein.
Could be a tankard. Maybe a thermos.
Maybe a flask. Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Wasn't it better because I made you wait?
You know it was.
Come on. You know it was. One of the secrets to addiction...
Is non-predictability.
You would actually be more addicted.
This is actually science. You would be more addicted to the simultaneous sip if I didn't do it every time.
Because you'd be upset because of the times it didn't happen, you'd be looking forward to it, and you actually reinforce your addiction circuitry if it's unpredictable.
So I like to keep it predictable, though, just so you can plan your workout.
By the way, I hear from people that this is the ideal periscope.
Or YouTube, depending where you're watching it, for working out.
It's just the right length.
So think about that.
All right. Here's some more fun.
There is now a drone bullet.
They call it a bullet, but I'm not sure that I would call it that.
So it's a little bullet-shaped drone.
That can, I guess, has 20 minutes of hover time and 12 minutes of flight time.
So you can basically send this one-way trip drone bullet over your destination.
You could have it hover there for several minutes while you're deciding whether to kill whatever is below it, and then you just drop it.
Now that that's possible, How many of them are you going to see?
You're going to see a lot of them.
Now, I wrote a book many of you know called The Religion of War.
I wrote it, I don't know, 15 years ago or some long time ago.
And it predicted this day, this day when the bad people will be able to send small drones anywhere they want to kill anything that's outdoors.
So much so, That I speculated that these drones would actually be able to go through a doorway.
In other words, a proper drone, like this bullet drone, could actually hover outside a public building and wait for somebody to open the door.
And it could follow them in.
The drone could actually internally go down hallways and find somebody's office.
There's nothing that would stop it.
Because once it's in, people in an office don't have guns or anything.
So if a drone gets into an office building, What are you going to do?
I mean, nobody's going to stop it with their hand because it's probably got propellers and stuff.
So all I would have to do is tailgate somebody into a building and it could hunt somebody in a cubicle and kill them in their cubicle.
You could swat it, but I don't think you would, because you would just be walking down the hall at work, and you'd hear a noise, and you'd turn around, and it would go vroom.
So I don't think anybody could stop it once it got inside.
So that's something to look forward to.
The things I've predicted are that Number one, unless we develop some kind of real counter drones, which is possible, I think.
A bunch of drones that fight other drones.
But even then, there's a number problem.
Because if you have counter drones, you only need one extra drone that, you know, so that you're outnumbered.
So it's going to be probably the end of outdoor activities.
When I say outdoor activities, I mean group activities.
So I think that's common.
But I also think that the only defense is a complete and total lack of privacy.
In other words, the government would not be able to keep its citizens safe without having total information about every human who steps foot on this country.
And I think that's where we're heading.
And, of course, you can't get there unless you can also control your border.
So when you're looking at this drone problem, know that the only way to stop them is, you know, somebody said EMP. We're not going to do that on the homeland.
The only way to stop them is to have complete and total lack of privacy of all human beings alive on the homeland.
Short of that, there's nothing that's going to stop it.
And the only way you can have complete and total information about citizens, among other things, is to stop all illegal immigration completely.
You'd have to bring it down to almost zero to stop the drone problem alone.
So that's what's happening.
I think you will see a complete and total lack of human privacy, and you'll be glad you got it, because the alternative will be worse.
All right. Now, oh, and if you're afraid that this complete and total lack of privacy is going to lead to a dictatorship, Well, maybe.
But if we have the information about the leaders themselves, if they are also completely transparent, it's not as dangerous, is it?
The real problem with privacy is that some people have it and some people don't.
Because the people who have the privacy will have a gigantic advantage over the people who have no privacy.
Because you can send them to jail anytime you want.
Well, they have no privacy. I can find something you're doing.
But the people who still have privacy would be protected.
So your most dangerous situation for privacy is some have it and some don't.
That's terrible. But if you get to a point where nobody has it, the police don't have it, the government doesn't have it, nobody has it, and we can all find out anything we want about anybody, then it's harder for people to abuse you.
Because it would be so obvious and somebody would respond and you couldn't get away with anything.
You might not want to live in that world, but that's probably where we're heading.
All right, let's talk about the...
There was a story that said there were three different prediction models...
Let's say that President Trump will win easily in 2020.
So three different models.
And I think they look at things such as the economy is doing well and inflation is low.
So they're looking at these external markers that have always been very accurate in determining who is going to get elected.
But we didn't see too many prediction models work in 2016.
Some did, but mostly the prediction models did not work in 2016.
What would make them work in 2020?
Why would we trust any prediction models after living through 2016?
Well, I would say we shouldn't, because there's something about this president that's not like any other president, and that probably every rule that used to exist just doesn't count anymore.
So I'm gonna give you two different prediction models.
Number one, I've already mentioned.
This prediction model says that social media learned its lesson in 2016.
They learned how powerful they are.
They've had four years to improve their effectiveness, and that the people running these social media companies, primarily the people who are closest to the algorithm, this does not mean the CEOs.
So when I talk about social media manipulating results in the election, I'm not talking about The top person in the company giving an order to the underlings to do this.
I think that's unlikely to be true because the people who are at the top have way too much to lose because they have good lives.
They don't want to throw it away committing something so stupid.
They would be, of course, ratted out.
There's no way that a CEO of a social media company could give an order To put their finger on the scales and hope that that wouldn't get out someday.
Too many people would know about the order.
It would be effectively handing over your entire life to somebody else.
Let me put this in a word picture.
You're Mark Zuckerberg.
And let's say, I don't believe this is the case, so I do not believe that Mark Zuckerberg thinks the way I'm going to explain, but imagine if he did.
If he thought, hey, I want to influence this election however I want to influence it, imagine him calling somebody into his office, an underling, and saying, hey, I want to put my finger on the scale of this election, so why don't you go do it, do what you need to do to the algorithm to make this happen.
At that moment, The underling owns Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg would be giving away all of his power because the person who knows that he ordered them to change the election could just go to the media.
That person would own Mark Zuckerberg not just that day and not just during that election year, but forever.
Mark Zuckerberg's job Would depend on the loyalty and keeping happy the one person he ordered to go change the algorithm.
So in my opinion, the Jack Dorseys, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Sundar, who am I pronouncing his name wrong?
I can never pronounce Google's CEO. I don't believe any of them are giving an order to an underling.
To say, go do this.
I think that's the least likely thing that's happening.
The most likely thing is that lots of people are involved in lots of individual decisions that somehow feed into this large algorithm monster.
It's lots of people with lots of different theories on how to change the algorithm for a lot of good reasons.
You know, things that would help the consumer, etc.
There is probably a handful of people at least in each of these companies that know that if they choose this choice they get a certain set of outcomes and if they choose this other choice for the variables or the code in the algorithm they'll get a slightly different outcome.
I believe that those people could both consciously and or unconsciously influence the election.
Fairly simply, just by changing a variable and knowing how that would ripple through the system.
So, we've got one theory, one prediction model says that social media, of course, has the ability to influence the election.
And I'll say more about that in a minute.
They have the ability, they've had years to perfect it, and they have the motivation.
So if nothing changes, social media will decide who is the president.
That's the first model.
So I provocatively made that assessment, which I won't call a prediction because it's a straight line prediction and those are absurd.
A straight line prediction says...
Suppose nothing changed between now and 2020.
This is what it would look like.
And what it would look like is that Trump would not win because the social media companies have the will, the power, the ability to influence things and they could cause that not to happen.
But what are the odds that nothing changes between now and 2020 that would change the balance of the votes?
Very low. The odds are very high that something will change.
So here's the other prediction model.
It's called the Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters.
It's the most reliable law you will ever see in terms of predicting.
It has predicted the outcome of every disaster we've ever encountered.
In terms of disasters that we saw coming for a long time.
So the way the Adams law of slow-moving disasters works is if everybody can see a problem coming, and we've got lots of time to get a solution, and we know exactly what the problem is, even if we don't know how to solve it on day one, we're really good at figuring out how to deal with it over the long run.
So because we're very alerted to the fact that the social media companies can put their thumb on the scale, we also have two years to do something about it.
So what are the odds that either the voters or some individual or some inventor or somebody in the social media companies themselves, it could actually be one of the CEOs of the social media companies, could do something different than what we expect.
What if the government decides to do some small form of regulation that just gets to this question and that's all?
Suppose the government, and I'm not proposing this, I'm just allowing you to imagine things.
Suppose the government said, well, we don't have enough time to put together a comprehensive regulatory framework But we're going to, because the election is so important, and we might have Russian interference, we might have a variety of different interferences, I'm going to appoint a special judge for the algorithms.
Now is that legal? I don't know.
But imagine that we could do something like that some way.
We could probably figure out how to make it legal, if it's not legal.
So it'd be a special judge, sort of like a special prosecutor type person, who is the only person who's allowed with that person's small staff.
They're the only ones who are allowed to see the algorithms.
Of all the major players.
So that they would have complete freedom to go in and look at any kind of confidential documentation.
Now that would be a very special type of oversight that would be limited to the election.
So it wouldn't be the big oversight where they're making sure every person is treated the same and every business has visibility and there's no censorship and stuff like that.
I'm not talking about that stuff.
That stuff might also have to happen.
But you probably need some judge and a small group of people who just have access and full visibility to the algorithms and what it all means.
Now, it could be that it's too complicated.
It might be that it's just so complicated that you can't even get anybody who could understand it.
I think that's possible.
But the larger idea is this.
If nothing changes...
The social media companies will determine the election.
And I'm going to say a little more of that.
But we have a few years to come up with a solution that nobody's thought of.
I haven't thought of.
You haven't thought of. There's probably a solution.
And it may have nothing to do with the algorithms.
It could be some entirely, you know, different mechanism.
So a lot of creativity will go into it.
Everybody sees this as a problem.
I think it will be solved. Somebody said to me, actually several people said to me on social media, they said to me, Scott, you are overstating the effect of social media because you're on it and you think everybody's on it because when you're in that world it just seems like everybody's on Twitter and everybody's talking about the news.
But the reality is most people don't care about social media, at least in terms of following the news.
Most people probably don't even follow the news.
Most people are sort of dialed into their own world, and social media will not have that much impact.
To which I say, wrong as wrong as you could be.
I'm seeing people agreeing with that statement in the comments, agreeing that social media can't influence us that much.
Here's why you're wrong.
Certainly the news collectively can influence people.
I think you'd all agree with that.
But when I say influence people, we're only talking about that thin sliver of people who could be influenced.
98% of the country can't be influenced.
98% of the country already know who they're going to vote for.
It's either going to be whoever the Democrat is or Trump.
Maybe 2%, maybe 5% could be moved in any direction.
So they're the only ones that matter.
That's the first thing to know. And beyond that, it's not even the small percentage of people who could change their opinion that matter.
They have to be in the right states.
Because if they're not in the right states, moving 1% or 2% in either direction doesn't make any difference.
It's still going to be the same result, just the margin will be a little different, but the same outcome.
So there's a very, very small group of people who matter.
People who can be persuaded, and they're in the right half-dozen states.
That's it. We might be talking about 200,000 people.
That's it. 200,000 people.
They're the only ones that have to be influenced.
Now, the way the news works, for those of you who have never spent time in this industry, if you don't know the business model of the news, you could be caught blindsided by the By the importance of social media to the news in general.
Here's how it works. If you're a news organization, you say, hey, here's some news.
You report on the news, and then you watch social media.
Because social media is going to tell you how much people care.
They're going to tell you what people think about it.
They're going to tell you what people click on.
They're going to tell you why headlines get the most traffic.
That feedback loop goes back to the news.
So CNN or anybody, Fox News, they do a story because they found some information that's new and relevant.
Then they monitor social media to decide if they do more of it.
So there's no such thing as just watching the news anymore.
If you're watching the news and you have no social media accounts, you're still watching social media because the news is responding to social media and doing more of what it says they need and less of what it says they don't need.
Now, when I say social media, I mean the Internet in general, how much people are clicking on their news sites, how much traffic Twitter is driving to their news sites, Facebook, etc., So there's no such thing as somebody who's not watching social media.
Because if you watch any kind of news, you're watching social media.
And those few people I'm talking about who might have some chance of moving one way or the other, far more likely to be watching the news.
Because the people who are, let's say, data-driven, are looking for data.
So they're the ones who actually care what's happening because it might influence their decision.
If you've already decided and it doesn't matter what the news is, you don't need to watch.
So social media will in fact change the news and the news plus social media are the only things we have to go on.
It's the only thing that moves people's vote is social media plus the news.
So everybody's watching social media even if they don't have a social media account.
Now, I'm borrowing a bit from Vox when I make this claim.
I watched a very interesting video by some writer, I guess, some journalist at Vox, V-O-X, not Fox.
And Vox made a provocative but ridiculous claim.
They said that Fox News has a special place in our, I guess, our idea ecosystem that is unmatched by people on the left.
And their claim, which is just laughably ridiculous, is that Fox News comes up with a bunch of ridiculous stuff, and even if you don't watch Fox News, the other media have to talk about it.
So in other words, Vox was making the claim that even if you never have watched Fox News in your life, you're still seeing their news on CNN and MSNBC because they talk about Fox News.
So that Fox News is driving the news cycle in a way that the left doesn't have any equal.
To which I say, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
That sounds like a video made by somebody who doesn't own a television.
Because, yeah, obviously Fox News is just the balance to CNN and MSNBC. They're just identical entities on the other side.
There's no difference.
He came up with this fancy theory about some kind of a, what he called the hack gap.
Hack meaning a news person who's not really trying too hard to cover the news but is just trying to do their job, I guess.
And get paid. And he's acting like there's some kind of gap that Fox fills in that everybody is responding to.
It's ridiculous. In fact, Fox News frequently, every single day, they play clips from the competing networks, CNN and MSNBC, to mock them.
And that's just what CNN does.
They play clips from Fox News to mock them.
It's the most common thing on both networks.
So the whole Vox video was so ridiculously, just transparently ridiculous, that it made you, it reminds you what kind of a little bubble people are living in, that they could even produce something like that.
And that there were probably a room full of people who all said, yeah, that sounds reasonable.
Yeah, it's only happening on the left.
Yeah, it only happens in one direction.
That sounds quite reasonable.
Let's make this video. It's mind-boggling that you could put, you know, several people in a room and nobody would say, um, I just got to mention that this looks exactly the same in both directions.
Has anybody seen that? But that didn't happen.
All right. Somebody told me that...
That YouTube is blocking.
I don't have a confirmation of this.
And part of the problem is these things are hard to confirm.
So we're going to come to believe things about social media that we can't confirm, and I may be adding to it.
But since my story is that things are hard to confirm, I think it's fair to say it in this case.
So somebody told me that YouTube is blocking people from playing a video, and I'm trying to describe this video without getting blocked myself.
Let's just say there's a person whose first name is David and his last name is D-U-K-E. So there's a video about that guy and I'm not going to say his name and apparently that guy in his videos says that he wants to clarify that he never supported or endorsed President Trump.
And that video apparently is blocked On YouTube.
Now, you can't share it or something.
Now, it could be just the algorithm is just picking up his name, and because his name is identified with some of the worst ideas in America, it could be that that's all it is.
But how do you know?
Because... I already told you that my videos that talk about a certain topic, the F-I-N-E-P-E-O-P-L-E-H-O-A-X, so I don't even use the words anymore, because I don't want to get demonetized and then become invisible.
But when I made my videos on that topic, showing that the way it had been covered was fake news...
They all got demonetized, which means they're less visible.
Now, let me ask you this.
If only one thing happened between now and 2020, what would be the effect of the election?
What if the one thing that happened and the only thing that happened between now and 2020 is that social media allowed the truth to come out What if social media allowed the real story to come out that that had always been fake news?
It's the single most important piece of belief that people have about this president.
It really is the primary thing they object to, is that piece of fake news that informs all their other beliefs about him.
So when you talk about social media influencing people, if you could get that message to this thin sliver of people, Who actually could change their votes and you gave them the real news about just that one story.
Nothing else. Let's say that everything else in the world is the same.
Just that one story got debunked because it's not true and then everybody found out it's not true.
What would that do to the election?
It would be a massive landslide for Trump because people would realize how bamboozled they had been.
But we can never realize that because that message that it's a HOAX is suppressed on social media evidently because, you know, I watch my traffic just fall off a ledge when I talk about it.
Yesterday, civil rights champion John Lewis who has an amazing resume for fighting for civil rights, went on TV or said in public that he cried when Trump said there were, quote, a certain type of people who are good on both sides.
You know what I'm talking about.
I'm not going to use the words because then it'll get banned or demonetized.
And thankfully, Joel Pollack Corrected that on Breitbart, but people who support John Lewis are not reading Breitbart, so they'll never know.
So there's a perfect case where there was a fake news, what John Lewis said, then the correct news, which corrected him, shows the transcript, makes it very clear that everything he said is a lie.
Which of those will get noticed later?
Only one of them, right?
John Lewis' statement will get noticed because there's nothing slowing it down.
The fact correction will be stopped in its tracks.
It will stay in its little silo.
People who are going to go see Breitbart anyway will see it.
Nobody else will see it. So, that little change and nothing else would completely change the result of the election.
So, That's the sort of small change that you can imagine happening with the Adams law of slow-moving disasters.
Somebody could figure out how to get that one message through the social media filter.
If somebody could do that, then it would change the election.
That's just one way it could be changed.
All right. Let's talk about Joe Biden.
Oh, before I talk about that, I think it's hilarious that Alyssa Milano is calling out John Voight on social media and calling him an F-list actor and acting as though he should not be talking about politics.
Things could not get any better than that.
There's nothing to say about that.
It's just funny that Two, an actor and an actress are calling each other illegitimate for their political opinions.
All right. I have to wonder, so there was an article that I tweeted around in which apparently I'm not the first person to notice that Joe Biden is invisible.
So Joe Biden's, apparently Joe Biden's campaign strategy is to not be seen and not be interviewed and not get on the news and importantly, not talk about policies too much.
So Biden has decided that the citizens of this country are so dumb, and I think he's right about this, he's decided that the citizens are so dumb that he doesn't even need to talk about policies so much.
It's like, I'm not even going to talk about policies.
If he talks about policies, then there are things to criticize.
If he just says, orange man bad, which is so far all he's saying, if he says orange man bad, then people will vote for him.
And apparently that's enough to make him the frontrunner.
So, the simulation has handed us another little inside joke.
Because when I hear Biden's name, B-I-D-E-N, I always think to myself, Biden?
Is he Biden his time?
I guess he's just biding his time.
He's just waiting. And that seems like his entire campaign strategy is just, I'm just biding my time.
I'm trying not to say anything because people will yell at me and they'll look at my record and stuff.
That can't be good. So I was trying to imagine what that conversation was like when his advisors, who I imagine were the ones who broke it to him, what happened when the advisors for Biden were telling him what their strategy would be?
I imagine the conversation when something like this, playing the part of Joe Biden's advisor, will be Dale, the anti-Trump critic.
So, Joe Biden, we've got to do a new political strategy for you.
Oh, that's great. What is it?
What is it? I'll do my Joe Biden eyebrow furl.
What is it? Can't wait to hear it.
Well, we've decided that instead of doing interviews, you will not do interviews.
Oh, okay, I got it.
I get it. We'll de-emphasize the interviews so that I'll get more attention for my rally speeches.
Good, good. That's a good strategy.
No, no.
We're also going to de-emphasize your rally speeches.
Okay, I got it, got it.
No interviews, no rally speeches.
So we're all going to concentrate on the policy.
I like it. I like it.
It's going to be really policy-centric.
No personality stuff.
No, no.
No, no policy stuff.
So let's do no interviews, no rallies.
We'll do a few just to make sure that people know we're still running.
But we don't want to get on television and stuff, so don't say anything that would be...
Something somebody might quote, for example.
And make sure that you don't have any policies, because somebody's just going to, you know, criticize that.
Okay, I got it, I got it.
No interviews, won't do too many public appearances, and light on strategy.
So, we're going to use my, really just the power of my charisma and my personality to No, no.
I would de-emphasize your personality.
It's not going to get you there.
End scene.
So, somewhere there was a real-life conversation in which somebody sat in a room with Biden and said, in some kind of words, you know, Joe, the less of you the voters see...
The more likely they are to vote for you.
Now, I don't think I'm making that up.
Was it the New York Times?
There was some major publication who just wrote essentially the same story.
And by the way, I would like to pat myself on the back here a little bit.
You can join me just for watching these periscopes.
All right, so it's a pat on the back moment.
So you get a pat on the back for watching these periscopes.
I get a pat on the back for being, I believe, the first person in the country who correctly identified that Biden was trying to be invisible.
That he was intentionally staying out of the public eye while running for president.
I was the first one.
And now it's going to be a thing.
So there's already a story on it.
People are noticing. And pat yourself on the back.
Good job. Good job.
All right. I've told you many times that one of my, let's say, techniques for understanding the world is to consciously look for the empty space.
Look for the thing that isn't happening.
So while everybody's looking at the shiny objects, I always say, okay, you've got to look at the shiny objects.
You can't not look at it.
But sometimes, spend a little time looking for the things that you think should have happened but aren't.
Because those are telling you a lot.
What should have happened is you should have seen a lot more Joe Biden in the last several weeks.
I noticed, hey, there's a conspicuous lack of Joe Biden, given that he's the leading candidate.
Now... Clearly, that's a decision, and it's a decision by probably lots of different people, because the news industry could do stories about Joe Biden all day long.
Joe Biden doesn't have to agree to participate.
The news can just do stories about him, because there's always something.
But they're not.
There are very few stories about him, except that he's leading in the polls.
And that his advisors could have done things, you know, to give him more visibility.
He could have done things.
So there are a lot of people making individual decisions who have all decided collectively, apparently.
I'm just assuming based on the outcome.
I'm not reading minds. But based on the outcome, it seems that a lot of people in different jobs have all come to the same conclusion.
The more you see of this guy, the less you're going to like him.
So that's a problem.
It is funny. All right.
Let's talk about Trump downplaying North Korea.
Once again, Trump, I believe, has set the standard by which future presidents will have to rise.
Did that sentence make sense?
You know what I'm talking about. I believe that even though President Trump is being criticized because he's criticized no matter what he does, The criticism that he's being too, let's say, forgiving to Kim Jong-un, who fired off some small rockets, and other people are being more hard-assed, really is just telling me that he's the smartest president we've ever had.
And it just becomes...
And by the way, I mean that literally.
I don't mean that if he took an SAT that he'd beat Obama, necessarily.
I don't think that's necessarily the case.
Obama's pretty smart. But in terms of understanding people, Trump is the best.
Trump is absolutely the best at understanding people.
I would say Bill Clinton is in that range, but I think Trump takes it to another level yet.
And here's what he's doing right.
I've said this a number of ways, but it's so important that it's worth saying again.
Trump has pioneered the idea that you can be nice to the leader while being tough and negotiating, and that you don't have to give up anything in either area.
Now, Part of that is that his personality is, you know, when at all costs, you can put up with any kind of problem or blowback or criticism as long as he's got a strategy that's going to get him where he wants to go.
So he can simply take more heat than other people.
So being nice to Kim Jong-un is something he could do because he's the president who can take more heat.
It's an option for him.
I'm not sure other presidents would even have the option because it would look at a character.
But when Trump does it, you say, okay, that's totally in character.
And if there's one thing I can teach you, If there's only one thing I can teach you today, it's that when people stay in character, we accept them and even their decisions because they're consistent and in character.
We only get freaked out and we get worked up and angry when somebody acts in a way that we think is out of character.
So if you had taken, let's say, Obama and suddenly started being nice to Kim Jong-un, that would be so out of character That you would be bothered by it, and you would lose your trust in Obama.
But because Trump is the guy who can have lunch with Don King, you know, he's got supporters who have every kind of, you know, obnoxious belief you could imagine.
No problem. He could invite me into the Oval Office.
No problem. Can you imagine another president taking even that tiny little risk of having a cartoonist in the Oval Office?
I mean, I don't bring a lot of credibility to anybody.
But he can do that. He can talk to Putin.
He can talk to President Xi.
He can talk to the pirates of the world.
And he said, you know, I'd like to meet with Iran.
Could Trump meet with the Ayatollah?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
So he's created a space for him to operate that's very productive for the country.
Because... I don't know about you, but I have never felt safer about North Korea until this administration.
How many of you would say the same?
I feel completely safe about the odds of any kind of a nuclear war with Kim Jong-un now.
I mean, there was a time when I was definitely worried about it.
But at the moment, I've never felt safer.
And it's entirely because of the personal relationship.
The fact that Trump said basically he backed Kim Jong-un over Joe Biden, in a sense, the fact that he would do that without a second hesitation Makes me feel good.
Because Kim Jong-un, what does he want in the world besides survival?
I'm sure he wants good things for his country.
Why wouldn't he? But he wants survival.
But he also knows that respect is a big part of that survival.
Trump is giving him that respect.
So he's giving Kim the thing that he was trying to get with nuclear weapons.
He's giving it to him in a different way that only Trump can give him.
Because Trump can be his buddy.
And by the way, whenever Trump leaves office, I'm assuming it's going to be in six years actually, he probably will stay friends with Kim Jong-un.
In fact, the odds of Trump visiting Kim Jong-un as a private citizen are pretty good.
They're pretty good.
I think there's a good chance it would happen.
All right. So I think Trump plays North Korea perfectly right.
I think that time is on his side.
Because North Korea's economy is doing nothing but getting worse, and we don't seem to have any special risk on our end.
In fact, it looks like we're saving money because we're doing fewer war games and such.
So we may just be saving a little money.
We've completely eliminated our, you know, big risk from North Korea.
Yeah, we just wait.
See if things improve.
I think they will. All right.
Let's talk about Duncan Hunter, Representative Duncan Hunter, who was supporting, at least verbally supporting, the Navy SEAL who was charged with a variety of things, including taking a photo with a dead ISIS fighter, I guess, and sending it to somebody.
And Duncan Hunter, who's now a representative but had been in the military, said that he did the same thing without sending it to somebody.
So his point was that it's fairly common, unfortunately, fairly common, for people to take a photo of a dead fighter or civilian, I guess, for whatever reasons.
It's less common for them to send it around because that's what gets you court-martialed.
And I thought to myself, I had two reactions.
My first reaction was, Duncan Hunter, you just did something really stupid.
You just associated yourself with a despicable crime, which nobody should want to associate themselves.
He actually got all the way to Congress, and then he just painted himself as the same kind of despicable person who would take a picture of a dead person.
That was my first reaction.
Here was my second reaction.
If you're in the military, you don't leave people behind.
If one of your own is dead, you make sure that even if it risks your life, you're going to protect them.
Basically, you're going to have the back of people in the service.
And my second opinion, after thinking about it a little bit, is that this was actually quite valiant, meaning that Duncan Hunter took a bullet for somebody else in the service.
In essence, he was taking the heat Off of his fellow service member, at least somebody who was also in the service.
They didn't serve together.
They were just in the military.
And I thought to myself, I've got to say I respect that, because he certainly knew what he was doing.
You can't say that Duncan Hunter didn't think about it.
That seems unlikely.
It just seems to me that there's something honorable about that.
Because there's nothing good that's going to happen to Duncan Hunter.
Nobody's going to say, I'm going to vote for this guy because he did this.
In fact, it could hurt him.
It might be the thing that gets him not re-elected.
He took a bullet for another member of the military.
I have to respect that.
I respect that.
So that's all I have to say about that.
I had an interesting conversation on Twitter with a few folks, started by Naval Ravikant.
If you're not following Naval, you should.
He's one of the top Probably top five Twitter accounts you should follow in the world.
And he's at AtNaval.
And as a neighbor, A-V-A-L. AtNaval.
So follow him. Anyway, on Twitter, I sometimes refer to Naval as the smartest person in the world.
I don't know if that's true.
I just haven't seen any counter evidence.
He might actually be the smartest person in the world across a whole variety of fields, which is what makes him special.
Anyway, he said on Twitter, and I'm paraphrasing, that the robots basically will take the manual jobs, but humans will have creative jobs essentially forever.
Because AI can't do creative work, people can, therefore people will always have this, you know, the artistic, the creative stuff, they'll always be safe.
No, not naval, naval.
At N-A-V-A-L. Not E-L. It's N-A-V-A-L. All right.
So, I... Yeah, so some people are saying, he's right.
Robots will take the manual labor, but the creative jobs will be left.
I weighed in with the following.
I, as you know...
I'm a creator. So I'm a writer.
I'm a cartoonist, which is sort of an artist.
I do these periscopes.
So as you've seen, in a variety of fields, I am very productive as a creator and creating different types of things, including, you know, the startup and inventions and everything else.
So I think most of you would agree just that I'm not trying to brag.
I'm just trying to set the stage for my point.
My point is I really, really know About creating.
I've got 30 years of it professionally.
The other weird thing that I know is that I did programming for a while.
So early in my corporate career, I did a lot of programming, made some video games, etc.
I was never good at it, but I learned enough about it that I can understand the basic concepts, right?
So once you have been a programmer, even if you're not up to date on current languages and such, you at least understand the limitations and the basic concepts, which is what I do.
In my opinion, creativity will be easily replaced by AI. And I say that as somebody who is a professional creator in a variety of fields.
Take humor, for example.
Many years ago, I came up with what I call the humor formula, which said that something is not funny unless...
You have at least two of the six dimensions of humor.
When I list them, I always forget one, but the basic idea is that something is either, you know, bizarre or clever or naughty.
There's six of them. But the point is, it's a formula.
I could write a program, even with my meager programming skills, I could write a program to write jokes.
And it would take me a while, and it would be, you know, the first versions would be rough, but I could already do it.
And I'm not even much of a programmer, but I could do it.
You just have to know what the rules are.
So the programming of it is actually trivial.
Knowing what to program is the clever part.
And I've already solved the formula for humor.
It is that formula.
You have to use two of the six dimensions.
And if those two are in there, and three is even better, but you've got a joke.
Now, could you teach AI to go look at all the jokes in the world and figure out what the best ones have in common?
Of course you could.
Then you could say, okay, AI, go check the trending hashtags and the social media to find out what's in people's minds.
You could do that.
Easy. Already do that, right?
There are already systems of figuring out what people are thinking about.
You already have 80% of what you need for a joke.
You've got the structure.
You've seen all other jokes and how they work.
You see what people are thinking about, which makes jokes funnier.
People are far more amused by something that's in the news, something they've experienced, etc.
Then you could test it rapidly.
And here's the part that people always miss.
I do rapid testing inside my own brain.
So in other words, when I'm trying to come up with a joke, what I'm doing really is I'm cycling through lots of possibilities and I'm rapidly discarding them.
So creating is not, you don't just sit there and then suddenly the idea comes in your head.
That generally doesn't happen.
What generally happens is you're processing lots of different ideas that are flowing through.
It's like a stream. So when I'm creating, I feel like a stream is going through.
And it's like, how about this?
How about this? How about this? How about this?
How about this? The ones that stick, I've got a little, let's say, a sensor for knowing which ones are good.
And the sensor is my physical body.
Because when one of those ideas in the stream goes through, and my body goes, and I'm exaggerating, but if I feel it in my body, then I know it's art.
That's how I know.
Because I can feel it.
My body goes, I get a chill, I laugh, I groan, I feel depressed, but I feel it.
So there's an actual physical, bodily sensation.
Now that's something that a computer can't do because computers don't have feelings.
So I've got a sensor for going through all of the possibilities and catching the one that matters because my sensor goes off.
It's my body. But AI can do that better.
All they need are a group of people who are willing to look at a first draft of a joke.
So AI can say, all right, there's 7 billion people in the world.
I'm going to try my best guess at what's funny.
I'm going to send it out to 100 of them.
If 70 of those 100 people laugh or, you know, they rate it and they give it five stars or whatever they do to rate it, you've got a joke.
If you send it to 100 people and nobody thinks it's funny or they don't even understand it, You discard it.
You send out a different version to another hundred people.
And you could do that so rapidly that you would do effectively what I do with my body, but you would do it with the population of the earth with small groups until you had crafted by trial and error and according to formula Something that was the funniest joke in the world.
And by the way, there are only a hundred jokes in the world.
They all have the same, they have the same like setup and etc.
I could easily teach a computer the hundred jokes.
They just have different subject, different verb, different time in history, et cetera.
But they're all a formula.
I hate to tell you.
It's pretty formulaic.
So that's just writing jokes.
It would seem to me that art would be even easier.
I'm sure that there, I think there are already AIs that do art.
And it wouldn't be hard to look at all the art that exists and figure out which ones people like the most, figure out what it is about the colors, the design, the complexity, whatever it is, and then reproduce that.
But not reproduce it perfectly, rather reproduce things that can test rapidly.
So if you forget about the ability to rapidly test, you can easily convince yourself that AI could never do creativity.
But AI will be able to rapidly test.
It's what it does best. It can test it with the instruments that are us.
So it can use the population as its sensors by just sending out little tests.
How'd that feel? Oh, it made me laugh.
It gave me chills. It made me cry.
And then they know they have something.
All right. So my prediction is that in 10 years, AI will be able to do all of the creative jobs.
Now, I'm not saying that all the creative jobs will go away.
I'm saying that in ten years, there will be at least one program that can do better than humans, even the best humans, on every form of creativity.
Including music, yes.
Music is probably more formulaic than most things.
So yes, music for sure.
Music would be easy. Visual art is easy.
Jokes are easy. Writing, AI can already write.
So we've already seen websites in which the AI is writing sentences and stories.
That already exists. And of course that will be better than humans because they can test it so rapidly.
All right. So that's my provocative idea right there.
I would ask you again to check YouTube if you want to see the replays on any of this stuff.
And just do a search on Real Coffee with Scott Adams and it'll pop right up.
Alright, I think I've covered most of the news.
Let me wrap up my prediction.
If nothing changes between now and 2020, the social media companies will determine the president, and that doesn't mean the CEOs of those companies, but rather the people working there who control the algorithm.
If nothing changes. But I'm sure that because of the Adams law of slow moving disasters that that disaster is so obvious and so clearly coming that there will be responses to it.
We don't know what those are and they probably will be effective.
So if I had to put my money on a result I'm betting Trump all the way.
If you want to feel better about this, right?
If I have to put my money on it I'm betting Trump with no ambiguity whatsoever.
You know, anything could happen between now and 2020, but I would bet that so confidently I could sleep pretty well on that.
And it wouldn't matter what the polls tell you today.
But it requires some kind of fix for social media that we have not yet seen.
Could be any kind of a fix, but there's got to be something that deals with that or else you don't get that result.
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